"On a typical day, 19 percent of U.S. Internet adults watch some form of video. News ranked first and comedy second overall. " (source: http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/techbits-online-video-game-use-in-game/n20070726000709990018?cid=1224)
We are not going to try to sell you on the merits of video in this article...we will show you with data that video is watched by large numbers of folks that you may not even be including in your marketing plan right now. Our thinking is that if a set of engaged prospective buyers are predisposed to watch property video, they should be watching yours....
Not Many Real Estate Video Vendors Talk About Engagement
How does one measure engagement? If the romance and emotion of real estate video is the "sizzle", then engagement is the "steak". Every one knows that having an active and engaged audience of prospective buyers is the key to success with online video. Engaged prospective buyers will watch videos not for entertainment but with the intent of actually contacting the agent or owner.
Think of engagement in three categories:
1 - visitor deciding to watch a given property video
2 - visitor decides to contact the seller or agent after watching a video
3 - visitor decides to purchase
We will focus on #1 today and leave the others to future posts. You'll see below that the average video clickthrough rates for video ads (which property videos essentially are) is between 5% and 8%.
From the perspective of a website owner, you have essentially beaten the odds when you have a user decide to click on any video (or link for that matter) on your site. One of the many things that I learned while at Microsoft is that sites lose approximately half of their visitors with every click required to proceed. 50% will choose to click away from your site. That said, there are many reasons that people will choose or not choose to watch a given video and it varies person by person. For example, I hardly ever watch an online video that doesnt present some context about what I am about to watch. But thats just me...or is it?
Measuring Initial Engagement
One such metric that we analyze on our sites is the level of "initial engagement" by visitors as measured by the % of people that are offered an opportunity to watch a video that actually watch one. It should be obvious why this is important - without initial engagement, there cannot be follow-on engagement opportunities such as contacts or sale. There are a number of elements that factor into initial engagement...basically all of the things that lead visitors to click on that first video.
The results? Compare the statistics quoted above with the following initial engagement levels on our sites and, while we do multiples of the average on all of our sites, how much more consistently foreign language visitors are engaged:
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http://property-tour.com/ (English): 50% of visitors that enter the site watch at least one video
http://vidlisting.com/ (English): 54.7%
http://forsalebylocals.com/ (English): 74%
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http://inmueblevideo.com/ (Spanish): 64%
http://bienesraicesvideo.com/ (Spanish): 40%
http://casacomprar.com/ (65%)
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http://emvenda.com/ (Portuguese): 69.9%
http://imoveisvideo.com/ (Portuguese): 40%
http://repousos.com/ (portuguese): 77.6%
http://imovei.com/ (portuguese): 79%
The above percentages are not based on small numbers (in some cases, well over 100,000 video views - we routinely get over 60,000 video views per month now) and they run fairly consistently. We believe that this data reinforces the case that "steak" is important - videos are much more effective when aggregated in places where people are looking to buy properties rather than where people are looking to watch videos. Need a counter-example? We have previously demonstrated that YouTube isnt the place where people are watching property videos at all (http://activerain.com/blogsview/120016/The-Data-Again-Shows). The numbers that we are seeing on sites to which we have extended our video infrastructure and have videos available on the home page show a rate of betwen 18% and 36%...still far better than the 5%-8% online average.
What We Do Differently
A quick shameless plug about why our numbers are so different from the average vendor's: Our approach to property video syndication and distribution is not only different but also demonstrably more effective. At http://vidlisting.com/, we pay attention to data and to user behavior. When we try something new, we measure results and those results are often completely different from what we initially expected...so we keep what works and change what doesn't. Our standard residential video package includes among many other things, syndication of videos on our network of sites in addition to professional narration in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Many people ask us why it is important to have videos in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Clearly, the data shows that this works. Compare our numbers to European video click through rates: "On average, video ads received a relatively high percentage of clicks--almost 5%--" (source: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=60165&Nid=30302&p=375893)
or Doubleclick's rate: "VIDEO SPOTS JUST GOT A bit of good news. According to new research from DoubleClick, 8% of Web surfers are interacting with video ads" - (source: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=57413)
In summary, when looking for a real estate video vendor, listen to the sizzle but ask for the "steak" - ask about average video views in the first two weeks and ask about their initial engagement numbers. Then give us a call, we've built an engaged audience...why shouldn't they engage on your real estate opportunity?
Tony
We now are able to film properties in Florida, North Carolina, Atlanta, Virginia, NYC, San Diego, Los Angeles, Spain, Italy, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
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